A new module has been added to China’s underwater data center to support more high-performance workloads.

The 18-meter craft was dropped into the sea at Lingshui, in south China’s Hainan Province, on Tuesday, according to China News Service.

It will connect to the existing underwater data center at Lingshui, which was installed in December 2023.

The data center is operated by HiCloud, a division of Highlander, the company that developed the data center in tests dating back to 2020.

According to local reports, the new module contains 400 high-performance servers and connects in to customers via a nearby shore station.

What sort of hardware is contained within has not been disclosed by HiCloud, but the module is apparently capable of handling 7,000 DeepSeek queries per second. It uses the sea water as a natural coolant.

The report said 10 companies have already signed on to utilize the data center for tasks such as AI model training and inference, industrial simulation, game development, and marine scientific research.

The HiCloud data center is thought to be the world’s first commercial underwater data center, though several companies have experimented with sinking servers under the sea.

Most notably, Microsoft built an underwater data center, Project Natick, which was submerged off the coast of Scotland in 2018. Though the 855 servers housed in the data center were said to work well, Microsoft confirmed to DCD last year that the project had been abandoned.

Two start-ups, Subsea Cloud and NetworkOcean, are both planning underwater data center installations, though the latter is thought to have hit permitting problems when trying to set up a test in San Francisco Bay.